Developers Are Hiding Deep In the Forrst

Kyle Bragger’s latest startup, Forrst, started as a side project that just got too popular.

Mr. Bragger started Forrst because he felt self-conscious about talking about coding on Twitter and Tumblr, where many of his followers wouldn’t understand or care.

Forrst is a private, invitation-only blog network for developers. It’s like the codecentric question-and-answer site Stack Overflow meets Tumblr. Programmers can post code, photos or links, or ask the community questions.

Mr. Bragger is signing up about 100 new users a day, but he wants to keep the community limited to skilled developers who will be highly engaged. Members get points by participating in the community, which they can use to invite new users.

Any users that don’t fit with the community–by being abusive, for example–are banned, along with the person who invited the offender.

He already has 20,000 users, but the idea of growing the user base slowly makes it tough to pitch to investors, he said at last week’s Inside the Founder’s Studio meetup.

But Mr. Bragger is launching a range of features that may be more obviously enticing. A few days ago he launched splash pages, or profiles, which users have started to set up at forrst.me. Eventually Forrst will add a job board feature, and users can link to their profiles and the work they’ve posted on Forrst to show potential employers.